Chapter 5244: THE Source Lands! III
Chapter 5244: THE Source Lands! III
Noah read the notifications as his multicolored light wrapped around Adelheid’s gold and held it together, the contact carrying the same warmth their bond had always carried, adjusted now for a space where the bond was not operating through cultivated channels but through whatever their two Sources were to each other at the level below cultivation.
He turned toward the direction the Terminal Infinity seemed to be flowing away from.
The obsidian chaos pressed against his multicolored Source and found it uncooperative. He moved through the waves the way something moved through water when the water was also listening to it, the obsidian Infinity around him not yielding out of weakness but responding to the Tongue that lived in what he was rather than in what he had built, each wave that reached his edges receiving a quiet instruction about its direction that the wave honored without apparent objection.
He guided Adelheid through the storm.
She did not speak and he did not speak. The space was not a speaking space. But he could feel through the connection between their Sources that the flickering at her edges had steadied from the moment his multicolored warmth had closed around her, the gold holding its shape with the assistance rather than fighting to hold it alone.
They moved!
—
Behind and around them in the transitional substrate, the others crossed.
The Maharanis delegation was visible as separate points of light in the obsidian storm, each one carrying its own Source configuration. Arjun burned the brightest among them, a deep gold-blue with the compound density of a Source that had been formed in extraordinary proximity to THE First Cause’s influence through his lineage’s long history with the prime Cause integrations his House was known for.
He moved through the obsidian chaos without ease but with the competence of someone who had trained for exactly this for a very long time, the waves hitting him and taking something from his stability with each contact but never enough at once to threaten the crossing.
His Custodes was less composed. The bright green of her Source flared with every wave hit, her light spiking and recovering in quick irregular rhythms, the recovery more effortful each time. She was pulling through. Not without cost!
The Ubergulden delegation was harder to watch.
Dietrich’s Source was strong- deep gold, broad, carrying the accumulated weight of his House’s direct lineage from THE First Cause’s Superbius expression. But the obsidian storm found him repeatedly and found purchase each time, his gold dimming and recovering across the crossing in a pattern that communicated something being spent that he did not have infinite amounts of.
His Sororis Prima Custodes blazed beside him with the combined authority of a Custodes bond pulling power toward its Ingenue, the two of them fighting through together in the way that Custodes partnerships were designed to do when circumstances required it.
The others in the group were struggling outright.
Two of the Ubergulden Silurian Paleozoic Scale Gilded Ones had their Sources compressed down to fractions of their initial expressions by the time the crossing was a third complete, the obsidian waves taking chunks rather than edges, their coherence declining in a way that made the question of their survival not an assumption but an open calculation.
Nothing about any of it looked like what it had looked like for Noah!
For Noah, moving through the storm with Adelheid’s gold cradled inside his multicolored brilliance, the crossing looked like a being walking through a difficult rain. The rain was real and the rain was heavy and the rain was soaking anyone else nearby to the skin and beyond.
He was not getting wet!
---
The obsidian chaos deepened as they pushed further through.
The waves had been manageable at the crossing’s start, each one hitting and being redirected by THE Infinite Tongue’s passive operation with the ease of water being told it had somewhere else to be.
Twenty minutes into the crossing, the waves were larger and the intervals between them had compressed until there were no intervals, just continuous pressure from every direction simultaneously, the Terminal Infinity pressing against their Sources with the sustained thoroughness of a filtering process that had been designed to take as long as the Source required it to take.
Noah moved through it.
Adelheid’s gold was holding inside his multicolored light, steadier than it had been at the start, the warmth of his Infinity doing what the prompts had confirmed it was doing. He kept her wrapped and kept moving and directed the obsidian waves around them with the continuous low-level engagement of a being for whom the control was not effortful but constant.
Then something changed in the direction of down.
It was not a sound and not a vibration and not any of the sensory categories that ordinarily communicated incoming danger. It was the specific sensation of his Hadean perception ringing out an alarm at an intensity that exceeded the alarm it had produced for the concealed Fourth Scale being in the domain where THE Advent Wall stood.
That being had been above Devonian Paleozoic Scale. This sensation was above that!
He looked down.
In the obsidian depths below their position, something was rising.
Two eyes. Crimson and cold, each one larger than the entirety of Noah’s Source expression, blinking with the slow brutality of a predator that had identified something and was in no particular hurry about what came next. The eyes rose with the patience of something that had always been here and knew that everything here eventually came to it!
Noah did not deliberate.
He smashed his hand downward into the obsidian chaos and shot their combined Source expression forward with every ounce of Infinity he could drive into the motion, the two of them rocketing through the terminal substrate at a velocity he had no clean measurement for, the obsidian waves shattering against the force of their passage rather than impeding it.
They broke through!
WAP!
The landing was jagged rock and coarse dark sand, their Sources smashing into a surface that was solid and wrong and present after the formless chaos of the crossing, and Noah absorbed the impact through his multicolored light and pulled Adelheid upright before looking behind them.
The obsidian sea churned where they had emerged from it.
Where they had just been, the entire visible expanse of crossing substrate had been devoured, a void left behind that raging dark waters rushed in to fill, the Terminal Infinity replaced by something darker and older and considerably less interested in testing Sources than in consuming them!
Fuck!
And rising from the edge of that void, its body moving through the space where the obsidian chaos had been with the ease of a being for whom this was simply water, was the creature.
Ancient. Archaic! The body of an eel stretched across more distance than his perception could currently track at its ends, its skin carrying the specific texture of something that had never been any other shape and would never need to be, its scales dark and absolute and carrying faint luminescence from whatever it had recently consumed. Its two crimson eyes found Noah across the distance between them with the particular attention of something noting a meal rather than a threat.
Above its head, a notification appeared.
|Source Eel of Infinity — THE Fourth Scale of Existence. ???????|